SUPPORT A FAMILY FROM 🍉🍉 TO SURVIVE THE HELLISH CONDITIONS.

As a rule of thumb, don't reblog donation posts or people asking for donations unless they've been vetted and reblogged by Palestinian bloggers. We usually go to lengths to verify this shit because we know scammers have been faking to get people to send them money, using the urgency of our genocide as bait.

It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.

Accounts don't just randomly spring up on tumblr without gofundmes while asking for someone to help them create a campaign. Fuck out of here with that shit.

I can't lie, I find it very odd that posts cautioning people against donating to individual* campaigns and promoting the idea of supporting mutual aid efforts and community kitchens in Gaza can rack up 10k+ notes--while a post promoting a community kitchen (that I can personally vouch for) struggles to get 1k notes, and has barely pulled in a couple hundred dollars over the past week.

I actively try to avoid using guilting tactics in fundraising, but this is weird to me. It's like people are using these posts as an excuse not to do things they already didn't want to do anyway, rather than actually taking their recommendations on board...

*In my experience, these campaigns often support large extended families + their neighbours

Chuffed

Mawasi Al-Qarara Mutual Aid Project

This campaign is a mutual aid initiative involving myself, my friends Mohammad Abu-Alwan and his two brothers in Palestine, and Shakhya Scri

MAQMAP is a community kitchen aiming to support families in the Mawasi Al-Qarara area.

some of you need to go outside and I dont mean that in a mean or condescending way I mean it in a "you would benefit from talking to real people face to face, and developing social skills" type way

How to Finish

I drew this poster for Jon Acuff and his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.

All the edgy grim dark stuff to “both sides” the autobots and decepticons in works bothers me because there is a perfect established moral failing across media for them: their ableism towards those in out-groups. Repeatedly the autobots are awful and contemptful to the “empties”, neutral noncombatants unwilling to join or unable to be accepted by either faction and who aren’t doing well. 

I want to see for once a human companion join them on a trip to cybertron and be horrified.

How Much World Building is Too Much?

Anonymous asked: This question is on behalf of my cousin who came to me for advice. When he has an idea, he writes the most detailed worldbuilding EVER, designs the characters and has a general idea of how the story will go, but then when he starts writing he does maybe 2 chapters and it dies. I, on the other hand, do ZERO worldbuilding ahead of time (I don't need much) and end up finishing 80% of what I start out to write. How do you know how much worldbuilding is enough? How do you keep from spending so much time planning that by the time you get to writing, you don't know where you're going with the actual story? I want to help him but our styles are so different, I don't know where to start.💔

(Ask edited for length...)

I identify with your cousin a lot, because this is often how my stories go. I'm first inspired by a place, or the idea of a place, and everything sort of grows out from there. In my early days, I would also pour everything into world building and character creation, only to find myself falling flat with the story. And a big part of that, I learned, was that I didn't really understand how stories worked. It was easy to build a world and set up characters, but since I didn't understand story structure, I didn't understand how to flesh out the nugget of a story idea I had to go with that setting.

So, one thing you might do is try to get a feel for where your cousin is in that respect. You can start by asking pointed questions about the potential plot, and if he doesn't have answers already, it will help guide him in that direction. Some questions I would ask:

1 - Who is your protagonist? What is their "normal world" life like before things are turned upside down with the inciting incident?

2 - Who and what is important to your protagonist? (Stakes)

3 - What past experiences have led to them being who they are now?

4 - What needs to change about your protagonist's life, beliefs, or values?

5 - What happens to turn your protagonist's world upside down? (Inciting incident) Who (or what) causes this to happen? (Antagonistic force)

6 - How does this affect your protagonist specifically, and what goal do they decide to pursue in order to resolve the problem?

7 - What steps does your protagonist plan to take in order to reach their goal? What knowledge, skills, resources, or help must they acquire in order to achieve their goal?

8 - What obstacles does the antagonistic force create that the protagonist must overcome on their way to the goal?

9 - How do the events of the story help to change your protagonist's life circumstances, beliefs, or values for better or worse? How will they change by the end of the story?

10 - How does your protagonist face off against the antagonistic force, attempting to defeat them once and for all in order to reach their goal? Are they successful? What is the aftermath and how is the character's world/life changed--for better or worse--as a result of these events?

If your cousin can answer these questions, they'll have a reasonably well fleshed out plot that should help carry them through the story. How little or much planning of the plot ahead of time they need is something they'll need to discover over time, but if the above isn't enough to help them get through the story, they might want to go back and flesh out the specific plot points. You can point them in the direction of my post Creating a Detailed Story Outline, which suggest several different story structure templates they can look at to help them coax out the specific plot points of their story. And, bear in mind that story structure templates do not have to be followed exactly. They're just a guide to help you flesh out the story. Many writers like to combine different elements of different plot structures as a loose guide as they write their stories.

I hope this helps!

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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Going to have to be more specific about Israel, I literally know nothing about it other than I think the land was given to the Jews after WWII because they've been the punching bag of the human race.

i don’t have the eloquence or the energy to give a really detailed response, but some of the stuff in my #palestine tag might be helpful

the problem with “the land was given to the Jews” is that there were already people living there, and the people who gave it away were not those people. the indigenous arab population had nothing to do with britain’s decision to give that territory away.

which is a problem. most palestinian people were willing to welcome jewish people who would want to live there, but this is a very different thing from literally taking away any autonomy they have in governing themselves.

and not only this, but since then israel has committed horrible, horrible human rights violations and war crimes against palestinian people, one of which being an-nakba, the day of catastrophe, when israel destroyed so many palestinian villages and killed so many people. this series can tell you more.

they are killing children. they are stealing water. they are razing villages to the ground. israel destroys olive trees, which is both economic violence (stealing people’s livelihoods) but cultural (olive trees have cultural significance to palestinian people). they are bombing schools.

i literally know people who are from villages that just don’t exist anymore. villages that were destroyed, people who have surnames referring to places that have been completely razed and replaced with israeli settlements.

and there’s so, so much more. so yes, israel is “controversial” because it is committing genocide and palestianians are not content to passively allow this to happen.

Sits TF fandom down gently. Please. Please understand that the whole 'Decepticons as revolutionaries/workers/etc' thing is new to TF from IDW1 and Aligned onwards and was not in G1. Or anything through TFA, for that matter. It isn't some inherent part of the canon that must always be there. Please do not 'correct' people on this, because you sound. Silly.

There's a huge difference between redemption and humanization. I feel like a lot of "redemption arcs" aren't actually redemption at all, they're just attempts to humanize the villain so that they seem multi-faceted, but people read them as "redemption arcs" and think that that is meant to justify all the evil they've done before and negate whatever made them a villain in the first place. I think true "redemption arcs" are actually kind of rare because true redemption would take making the villain acknowledge their crimes, reevaluate their actions, actively choose to do better, and then proceed to make amends and become a better person, and that would this take more time than most stories are allowed to give their characters.

I've also seen people argue that a character has to be poised for redemption from the jump for it to work because once a character does something "too bad", they can't be redeemed. I completely disagree because redemption isn't justification or forgiveness, so no matter how horrible a character's actions, they could choose to become better, but because a lot of people (including writers) think redemption means "erasing the character's flaws and making it so they did nothing wrong ever", a lot of attempted "redemption arcs" just end up erasing a character's entire history or justifying every evil thing they've ever done. And yeah, in these cases, the only way to make a character go from a villain to a perfect cinnamon roll with no flaws *is* to have been planning it from the beginning and make sure they never do anything that can't be explained away later.

TLDR: real redemption arcs require a lot of self-awareness, patience, and growth, which are things that are rarely actually allocated to villains, and that's why real redemption arcs almost never get executed. The reason people think redemption arcs are overdone is because there are so many attempts to either humanize a villain that get misconstrued as redemption or attempts to blatantly erase who a character was in the name of "redemption", which is really just poor character development.